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      Feature: From TV to the Stage

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      David Fairs on adapting Up In Town from The TV to the stage

      Originally a BBC2 six-part series of shorts, Up In Town might not appear the most obvious programme to revive for the stage. But that is what David Fairs has decided to do with this 20 year old programme. So we asked David to tell us a little more about the show and why now? The show will play at The Hope Theatre for four performances in April. Tickets can be booked here.

      “And then I was up in town. And for the first time ever, I didn’t want to be somebody else. I just wanted to be me.”

      This thought, this feeling, this often all too elusive dream is at the centre of Up In Town – a new 20th anniversary stage adaption of the 2002 Joanna Lumley TV series, playing at Islington’s The Hope Theatre for a limited four-performance run in April. We all want to feel like ourselves or, more specifically, be allowed to feel like ourselves; but in reality this is far from simple for many groups, including, in the case of Up In Town, middle-aged and older women. Sadly, at twenty years old, this story is no less relevant, and this is what attracted the team behind this new adaptation to re-explore the story of Maddie Blakelock as a one-woman show.

      Beginning life in 2002 as a TV series written, produced and directed by Hugo Blick (Emmy-nominated for 2014’s The Honourable Woman), Up In Town tells the story of Maddie, a divorced woman in her fifties, navigating loneliness, invisibility and a feeling of irrelevance. Having workshopped the idea during the depths of the Covid-19 lockdowns, producer/performer Priti Colbeck and writer/director David Fairs are now thrilled, with the blessing of Hugo Blick, to be transforming this beautifully conceived portrait of a flawed, funny, resilient and very real person into a one-hour, one-woman show. 

      Immersing yourself in the intimacy of Maddie’s dressing room, Up In Town is an open yet guarded conversation, the pieces of which gradually reveal a life story that is joyful, ridiculous, hopeful, hilarious, uncomfortable and heartbreaking. From Acapulco to West London, marauding rats to dishy vets, ailing pets to estranged sons, unfaithful husbands to a haunting photograph of a truly happy young woman, your evening with Maddie will be relentless and intoxicating. Always living through the emotion and artifice of cinema, the one thing that has never let her down, is Maddie more Dirk Bogarde or Vivien Leigh? James Dean or Julie Christie? Falling on hard times, those cinematic fantasies might be more important than ever.

      “I’m going to have to make a few more economies… still, that’s all right. Scarlet O’Hara ended up digging her own potatoes.”

      For Priti Colbeck and David Fairs, this has been a labour of love. Priti is herself a trailblazer, having only begun her acting career at the age of fifty; she is passionate about telling the stories of older women who have so much more to offer and so much life to live. David’s work has always revolved around increasing representation and spotlighting the stories of the side-lined. His previous critically-acclaimed plays as a writer include Macbeths and I Know You Of Old (also Hope Theatre productions, the latter of which was then performed at the RSC’s Dell), both of which reconfigure Shakespeare plays to place the female stories of Lady Macbeth, Beatrice and Hero front and centre; his Vault Festival play Tomorrow Creeps interweaved the music and magical empowerment of Kate Bush into a Shakespearian narrative of Hecate and Bronte’s Cathy, while Is He Earnest? told the unapologetically queer story of Oscar Wilde’s gross indecency trial crossed with the 1980s raid of Gay’s The Word (the bookshop at the centre of the wonderful film Pride). While arguably more down-to-earth, this adaptation of Up In Town is a natural successor – a deeply human story about disenfranchisement. For David (a member of the LGBTQ+ community) and Priti (a middle-aged British-Asian woman), this production is very much a celebration and a personal statement.

      So, come down to The Hope Theatre to meet Maddie on 10/11/17/18 April – but remember, fasten you seatbelts… it’s going to be a bumpy night.

      Thanks to David for penning this feature about Up In Town. For further information and to book tickets, visit The Hope Theatre’s website here. More

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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      New Musical ‘Bhangin’ It’ Explores Identity Through Bhangra

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      “Bhangin’ It” explores complex identity issues through an intensely competitive North American dance scene.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.SAN DIEGO — Rehana Lew Mirza stumbled upon the world of collegiate bhangra dancing. An aspiring screenwriter working as an office manager, she had finally fallen in with a group of South Asian artists. She tagged along with a friend to Bhangra Blowout, an annual competition in Washington, where teams are judged for the skill with which they dance in the exuberant Punjabi folk style.Mirza became a superfan. She attended seven or eight competitions. She wrote a treatment for a bhangra-themed film. She became a playwright, met another playwright, and then, when the two of them married, they performed a bhangra dance at their wedding.So in 2014, when she and her husband, Mike Lew, were exploring a possible collaboration with a musical theater composer, she dug out that unproduced film script. Now the resulting show, called “Bhangin’ It: A Bangin’ New Musical,” is having a first production here at La Jolla Playhouse, a highly regarded regional theater with a long history of birthing Broadway-bound work.“There are such high stakes at the competitions, but then it’s also a very joyous dance form, and I loved that juxtaposition,” Mirza said. “So when we were talking about what to work on, I was like, ‘How about a bhangra dance musical?’”Ari Afsar, center left, and Jaya Joshi, center right, with cast members during rehearsals. Afsar plays a college student who starts her own bhangra group after she’s kicked off the school’s team.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesIn an era when many theater makers are concerned about whose stories are being told, and by whom, “Bhangin’ It” seeks to depict not just an underrepresented demographic group (it does that, too) but also people whose identities are complicated, evolving or uncertain. The protagonist, an undergraduate named Mary Darshini Clarke, is the daughter of an Indian mother and a white father, and is struggling to figure out how she fits in.The show’s story is this: Mary, a student at the fictional East Lansing University in Michigan, is thrown off the school’s bhangra team because her dance vocabulary is not traditional enough. So she starts her own team — a heterodox group with a diverse range of students and movement styles. You can guess what happens next: The two teams face off against each other, and if I told you any more, it would spoil the show.Bhangra, a dance form originally associated with harvest festivals in India, is characterized by energetic kicks and syncopated drumming. If you can’t quite grasp it, no worries — neither can some of the members of Mary’s team; in one of the musical’s big production numbers, a restaurateur puts the students to work making curry, hoping the fluidity of movement associated with mixing ingredients and washing dishes will transfer to the dance floor.Afsar, center, with Vinithra Raj, foreground left, and Bilaal Avaz, foreground right. “This show is so connected to who I am — getting into the specificity of what does it mean to be biracial and mixed race,” Afsar said.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesThe show has echoes of “Bring It On,” but stands out with its focus on Asian Americans.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesIn sync: Afsar and Avaz during one of the many dance routines.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesDuring a rehearsal last month, in a giant mirrored studio with doors kept open as a Covid safety measure, the barefoot cast — wearing not only blue surgical masks but also wristbands to show they had tested negative for the coronavirus — worked through the movement, step by step, aiming for a visual crispness. “You guys are a little soft,” a choreographer said. “Go sharper.” The creative team was still changing the script — a new key here, a new lyric there — and there were occasional traffic jams, as groups of dancers, in yoga pants and T-shirts, tried to master a sea of stage crossings without colliding.The musical has echoes of many that came before it — “Bring It On,” set in the world of high school cheerleading competitions, comes to mind — but stands out with its focus on Asian Americans, and, in particular, those whose families come from South Asia.Avaz, center, with other cast members. The choreography includes not only bhangra, but also Bollywood, hip-hop and ballet.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesAsians and Asian Americans have been underrepresented onstage, and that has been particularly true in musical theater. The number of musicals about South Asians is small: There was “Bombay Dreams,” which opened on Broadway in 2004 and “Monsoon Wedding,” which was staged at Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2017, and there is a forthcoming project, “Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical,” which is an adaptation of a popular Bollywood movie that is to have a production starting in September at the Old Globe Theater, also in San Diego, before transferring to Broadway.“Bhangin’ It” is distinguished by being set entirely in the United States, and by its focus on a biracial protagonist. That distinction is personal for many of those working on the project: Mirza, whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father was born in India and then relocated to Pakistan after partition; the director, Stafford Arima, who is a Canadian of Japanese and Chinese heritage; and the lead actress, Ari Afsar, whose father is from Bangladesh and whose mother is third-generation German American.“This show is so connected to who I am — getting into the specificity of what does it mean to be biracial and mixed race,” Afsar, who previously played Eliza in the Chicago production of “Hamilton,” said one afternoon during a break from rehearsals. She had been working on a dorm room scene in which her character is grappling with her dual identity; at the same time, Afsar was figuring out how not to bang her head getting in and out of a bunk bed. “To have the mix of two very different cultures in a childhood, and how does that impact your psyche and your ethos and how you interact,” she said, “it’s really visceral to the idea of belongingness, or the lack of belongingness.”The show’s director, Stafford Arima, left, with the choreographer Rujuta Vaidya during a rehearsal.Tara Pixley for The New York Times“Bhangin’ It” has been a long-gestating project, delayed, like so many other theater works, by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2013, Mirza and Lew met a songwriter, Sam Willmott, when the three were matched up by the organizers of an event called the 24 Hour Musicals, at which artists write a show in a single day. They hit it off, and as they talked about full-fledged projects they might later work on together, Willmott mentioned his love for Golden Age musicals, prompting Mirza to bring up her shelved bhangra screenplay.They continued collaborating on “Bhangin’ It,” often at La Jolla, where Mirza and Lew were working on a trilogy of plays about the aftermath of colonialism when the theater offered them the use of a rehearsal room to try out their new musical. Four workshops later, they are finally onstage, now with the backing of two commercial producers, Mara Isaacs and Tom Kirdahy, who are among the lead producers of “Hadestown.” The musical will have a second regional theater production starting late this year at the Huntington Theater in Boston before a likely run in New York.The creative team has expanded to reflect the show’s ambitions. Arima, the musical’s director, joined just last fall; he is the artistic director of Theater Calgary, and in 2015 he directed the Broadway production of “Allegiance,” a musical about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The music team includes Deep Singh, a performer of Indian classical music, while the dance team includes Rujuta Vaidya, who specializes in Bollywood-style dance but has also judged bhangra competitions, as well as Lisa Shriver, who brings Broadway to the mix, and Anushka Pushpala, a bhangra specialist who once competed for University of California, San Diego and now teaches at Bhangra Empire in the San Francisco Bay Area.Lew, the author of “Teenage Dick,” a contemporary riff on “Richard III” that is being staged around the country after a successful Off Broadway run, said part of the goal in building a diverse creative team and cast was that no one artist would have to be the “sole avatar” of representation. Mirza, as the member of the writing team with South Asian heritage, often bore that burden.“The show is beyond the idea that representation matters — it’s to the point of: You belong,’” said Afsar, above left, with Contreras.Tara Pixley for The New York Times“What’s happened before is that writers of color were expected to have two jobs — you’re the writer of the show, but then you’re also the cultural ambassador,” Mirza said. “This show is meant to show the large breadth of experience within South Asian American culture, and the large breadth of experience within college lifestyle. So how do you include as many different voices as possible in the room, so you can actually show where the dissonance and where the friction comes in, because that’s what’s of interest to me.”The friction in the musical is over how much traditional practice should bend in a diverse society. “The question is, ‘Is it all tradition, or is fusion OK?’” Arima said. “This piece is not just about collegiate bhangra — that is the vessel for this story of understanding tradition versus modernity.”The diversity gives the show richly complex music and dance — the instrumentation includes a rhythm section, strings and keys, as well as harmonium, bansuri flute, sitar, tanpura, tumbi, tabla, dhol, daf and ankle bells.“Some of the initial numbers were thinking about tropes of Western musical theater and how to make that through a lens of a South Asian American college student,” Lew said. “It was taking two strong reference points, from South Asian culture and American musical theater, and intersecting them. The palette is wide.”The choreography includes not only bhangra, but also kathak, a classical Indian dance form, as well as Bollywood, hip-hop, jazz and ballet.“It’s a great story to tell right this minute, with the intersectionality: I am not one thing, I am multiple things,” said Christopher Ashley, the La Jolla Playhouse’s artistic director, who frequently works on Broadway. “And that intersectionality makes for a really interesting dance musical.”Ashley said the production had benefited from pandemic restrictions by opening the doors to online auditions, which in turn made it easier for the show to look beyond New York and Los Angeles as it searched for young performers, many of South Asian ancestry, who, Ashley said, “were not going to be all the people you always see on Broadway.” Among those in the cast is a member of the U.C. San Diego bhangra team (Da Real Punjabiz).“The show is beyond the idea that representation matters — it’s to the point of: You belong,” Afsar said. “Growing up, we always feel like others need to validate us in order to belong. I hope that this show helps young people realize that belongingness is actually within ourselves, and that this mixed-race college student bhangra kid is able to teach everyone that message.”Audio produced by More

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      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      Interview: Lucinda Spragg Telling It Like It Is

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      Grace Millie of Moon Loaf introduces us to professional feather ruffler, Lucinda Spragg.

      Lucinda Spragg: some would call her a creation of Moonloaf and Grace Millie, although Lucinda would no doubt tell us she is her own woman. And she is most certainly a woman on a mission. Right now she is preparing to bring her one woman show, Lucinda Spragg : An Evening With, to Lion and Unicorn Theatre between 29 March and 2 April, where she will be promoting her latest book: Jabbie Dodgers, as well as sharing her wisdom with us.

      So when she asked/ demanded we interview her, we really couldn’t say no, because, quite frankly, we are a little scared of her!

      It’s lovely to meet you Lucinda, why don’t you introduce yourself?

      Good afternoon, Everything Theatre. Lucinda here. I’m sure most of your readers will have heard of me already…

      Sorry, we have to admit, we haven’t personally heard of you before now.

      Well I’ll spell it out for you if I must. I’m Leader of the Regain Party. A freedom fighter, professional feather ruffler, and renegade. I’m a spanner in the works of the London Coffee House Elite. I’m also the host of my podcast, TripadPfizer.

      Of course, I’m sure the Corybnistas would have another answer for you. They’d probably describe me as a ‘controversial political activist’. Clods. 

      Why are you coming back now then?

      I’ve had something of a brief…hiatus. I’ve been back on the scene since October, resisting the democratisation of truth by the neohippies. Now there’s an album/band name combo for some bleeding-heart indie lefties.

      And why don’t you have her own Twitter account like most normal people, just so we can read more of your thoughts?

      Twitter? I’m banned. All reasonable people are. 

      So who would you consider as those reasonable people who Twitter has banned; are you saying people like Trump and Katie Hopkins? Are these your heroes and the people you most hope to emulate then?

      I believe it was Eric Clapton who sang ‘I had to find myself (find myself), I had to find myself (find myself), no use looking for no one else’. I presume that answers your question.

      I’m based on no one but me, baby. Eric Clapton did also recently sing, ‘is this a sovereign nation or just a police state?’, though, so I do like him. I am also a BIG Laurence Fox fan. 

      If we could speak to Grace for a moment and ask, as a writer and actor, do you find this extreme persona of Lucinda taking you over when you are preparing to walk out on stage?

      I’ve got literally no idea what you mean here?

      There seems a whole collection of extreme right-wingers such as yourself who claim to speak for the unheard, but very few that are left-leaning. Do you feel it would be possible to parody those on the left in the same way?

      There’s a very successful parody of, ‘activist, healer, and radical intersectionalist poet’, Titania McGrath. She’s a character written by the genius that is Andrew Doyle. Titania in no way does “exactly what the show accuses online activists of, reducing complex topics to nuance-free quips” (★ – The Guardian). 

      With so much going on in real life and our government at times looking like a parody of themselves, do you feel you have to become even more extreme to remain relevant?

      Again, not sure why I’m being asked this, but, as a general rule, I would say that parodying extremists involves amping up the levels of ridicule rather than creating genuinely extreme content yourself. Or something like that. 

      Moon Loaf’s last production, TIFO, was a very different show in content. How easy is it to produce two such unique shows? Are both connected though through being based around one strong central character?

      Moon Loaf have emailed me this response to give to you: 

      “Hello! Yes, that’s definitely a connection we’ve found helpful. But you’re right, they are very different characters and different worlds. That’s also what’s quite exciting about it, keeps us on our toes. It’s also been nice swapping round and having Kieran (Dee) directing Grace this time! We promise we’ll stop doing one-person shows soon, honestly…”

      Utterly perplexing. Haven’t a clue what they’re on about. 

      Could we see you make any appearances in future shows, there is surely space on the after-dinner speaker circuit for such an inspirational woman as yourself?

      Oh, certainly! I’m promoting my new book ‘Jabbie Dodgers’ at the moment, so that would be perfect. I’d rather speak before dinner, though, if possible. I like my audience hungry (for uncomfortable truths). 

      Finally, what is the best advice you can give us right now with so much focus on the cost of living crisis we are going through?

      Ditch the Pret subscription, buy a house instead. You can’t invest in a café au lait. You’re welcome, internet.

      Our thanks to Grace/ Lucinda for the time to chat to us. You can catch Lucinda Spragg : An Evening With at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 29 March – 2 April. Bookings here. More

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      For Female Directors, a Generational Shift

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      In Germany, a country with few theater leaders who aren’t men, professional success has often meant becoming one of the guys. Now, a new group of women are developing their own way. dFRANKFURT — Of the 24 new productions expected on Schauspiel Frankfurt’s three stages this season, two-thirds will be directed by women. This is an astonishing statistic in Germany, where gender inequality is still pronounced across the vast theater landscape. Despite advances in recent decades, women run only a small fraction of the 142 publicly owned playhouses, and, according to the latest available statistics, in 2016 only 20 percent of theater directors were female.Two current productions at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the municipal theater company, show how the theatrical ground here has shifted over a generation to allow more confident explorations of female self-expression. Both plays lie far outside the standard repertoire, which is consistent with a general trend in German theater to break out of the narrow canon of acknowledged masterpieces. But only one seems to provide a uniquely female perspective on the work in question.Claudia Bauer, born in 1966, is one of German theater’s most acclaimed and prolific directors. A fixture on stages throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the past quarter-century, she enjoys a certain seniority among Germany’s female theatermakers. But both formally and thematically, her productions often feel very similar to those of her male colleagues. Like them, she has spent much of her career sifting through the (mostly male) theatrical canon: Some of her most acclaimed recent productions have been based on plays by Brecht, Molière and Tennessee Williams.At Schauspiel Frankfurt, Bauer has turned her attention to Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise,” adapted for the stage in a surprisingly faithful version by the writing team PeterLicht and SE Struck.In a memorable sequence from Buñuel’s surreal Oscar-winning movie, a band of affluent Parisians, trying in vain to eat a meal together, inexplicably find themselves dining onstage at a theater. That scene takes on a heightened degree of absurdity when it is recreated in Bauer’s antic production. The audience, of course, has been there all along. Getting the actors onstage to acknowledge the spectators’ presence could come off as an all too obvious gag, but here it’s a subversive joke that suggests a sort of mutual recognition between the out-of-touch elites portrayed onstage and the affluent theatergoers of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial center.It is one of the inspired moments when Bauer finds clever ways to translate Buñuel’s mischievous provocations to the stage. Her production eschews the film’s ironic detachment and pretense of normalcy in favor of something far more energetic and flamboyant. With a gypsy swing soundtrack and live video projections by Jan Isaak Voges that roam Andreas Auerbach’s set — an upscale residence inside a giant white container — the production feels halfway between a sitcom and a revue.Aided by a nimble eight-person cast that forms a tight unit, Bauer turns the digressive and episodic film into a gleefully absurd carnival where farce coexists with horror.Like Buñuel’s actors, Bauer’s maintain their composure in the face of increasingly perplexing circumstances. But they also preen and pose with evident relish, performing as much for one another as for the audience. “Discreet Charm” was a hit here when it opened this month, and some local critics wondered whether it might be a contender for next year’s edition of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best German-language theater, to which Bauer has been invited four times. The festival recently instituted a quota to help promote the work of female directors: At least half of the 10 shows chosen must be female-led. However, the past few years have seen the dawning of a new generation of bold and self-confident female theatermakers, and I doubt that Theatertreffen’s quota, intended as a corrective, will be necessary much longer.“I and I,” written by Else Lasker-Schüler some 80 years ago and directed by Christina Tscharyiski, also at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.Robert SchittkoMany of the emerging female directors in Germany seem more committed to work that explicitly engages with feminist and post-feminist topics than directors of Bauer’s generation, who were pioneers in a male-dominated landscape where professional success often meant becoming one of the guys. Along with addressing issues of women’s representation, history and psychology, some of these younger directors — including artists from all over Europe, as well as the United States and Israel — are creating exciting stage aesthetics to address those themes.On Schauspiel Frankfurt’s smaller stage, the Kammerspiele, the Austrian-Bulgarian director Christina Tscharyiski, 33, has bravely taken a stab at one of the strangest, most obscure and most difficult-to-perform German plays of the 20th century: “I and I” (“Ichundich”) by Else Lasker-Schüler.That German-Jewish Expressionist poet and artist, who fled the Nazis in 1933, called her sprawling work, in six acts and an epilogue, a “hell play.” Composed in 1940 and 1941, “I and I” is an infernal romp that features characters from Goethe’s “Faust” and real-life personalities, including Lasker-Schüler herself and much of the Nazi high command. The unlikely group meets up in a version of hell somewhere in Jerusalem, which is where the author lived in unhappy exile until her death in 1945.The play was long ignored as an unperformable oddity: It made it to the stage for the first time only in 1979. In the barely four decades since, productions have been exceedingly rare. Tscharyiski’s take on “I and I,” stylishly designed by Verena Dengler and Dominique Wiesbauer, resembles a kind of Dadaesque haunted house where characters in Hasidic robes, medieval garb and Nazi uniforms wander a stage strewn with ash.Unfortunately, the production’s charms are largely visual, and the shortened performing version of the text fails to cohere in a compelling thematic, narrative or poetic way. Despite inspired performances by Friederike Ott as the poet, Lasker-Schüler’s alter ego, and Florian Mania and Tanja Merlin Graf as a pair of rival Mephistos, the demon who bargains for Faust’s soul, the production seems both overstuffed and underdeveloped, and much longer than its 75 minutes. Yet despite the production’s limitations, it feels momentous that this complex work is being reconsidered 80 years after it was written. And it’s heartening to know that a director as prodigiously talented as Tscharyiski can be enlisted to aid in our rediscovery of a key 20th-century artist whose theater works are too little known.Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie. Directed by Claudia Bauer. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through May 1.Ichundich. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through April 17. More